(Original submitter here) When I'm talking about "business" or "consumer" grade, I'm talking about the difference between, say, a Lenovo ThinkPad T Series (I consider this a business laptop) as it's got a metal chassis, no flashy chrome and it's not loaded from the factory with buckets of crapware, versus say a cheap Dell that's got shiny plastic all over it, the entire thing creaks and flexes as you pick it up or open the lid and it's loaded up to the hilt with more crap software than anyone really needs...
In this case, raw specs play a second place to ergonomics and build quality. This is for my accountant to use Excel and QuickBooks on. She needs a keypad, it's as simple as that. I want to get her a laptop that's not going to fall apart in a couple of weeks. She doesn't need a quad-core i7, 8GB RAM and a 2GB graphics card. She does need a decent sized screen (in particular vertical resolution is very important for Excel) and she does use the laptop on the move all the time, so not having a plug-in USB keypad (which I'll admit was my first response to her requirements) is important as there will often be nowhere for her to place it.
She's currently got a 17" Dell, is not too worried about the size or the weight, however after 2-3 years of daily use on the move, this laptop is ready to fall apart.
Cost is largely irrelevant, within reason of course, and a laptop that's going to last the distance and not break is more important than getting the fastest CPU available.
(I'm the submitter of this Ask) That looks awesome - the best of both worlds is to have a compact laptop with a keypad, and if the keypad can pop out the side, then that'd be great. It's a damn shame that they don't make them any more...
CGI has a LONG way to go before it can replace a good photograph. A well-composed, well-lit photograph can say more than most 3D animations ever could. And a photo is a lot easier and cheaper to produce. Who is going to pay a team of digital artists $100 an hour to create a 3D model of something when you can just tell Jimmy Olsen to go take a picture of it for a pittance?
The software to do 3D may be getting easier and cheaper. But good 3D artists aren't. And a single picture of a wounded, crying girl in Syria will always have a helluva lot more power than any 3D rendering of the deployment of Syrian forces. Photography isn't going all-CGI any more than movies are.
Good photographers charge similar rates, if not more than CGI artists. Sure, pressing the button on a camera may only take a fraction of a second, but there's the setting up of the shot, selecting the equipment, getting the lighting right, taking a number of shots, selecting the shots for retouching, processing the RAW images, retouching the images etc...
The real telling fact that photography is (in some situations) getting replaced with CGI is that it's already being done and you and I can't tell when it's done properly.
You can only tell if it's CGI when it's not done well.
I know a company that does photography for the auto industry. They mix their real photos with CGI. They receive CAD models from the automakers that are modelled down to the detail of the threads on a screw that holds an assembly in place. They render and/or raytrace imagery, using advanced shaders for things like the metallic paint on a car and caustics to project realistic lighting patterns from headlights and then these rendered images are blended with actual photography. You simply can not tell that the image isn't 100% real. Why go to all this trouble? In this case a vehicle produced for a domestic market may have, say, different tail lights. They'll shoot the foreign import model, render the domestic tail lights and stitch it together.
If there were only two countries that drove on the left-hand side of the road, or only two countries that didn't speak English, then I'd imagine that there'd be some pretty heavy international pressure for them to get in line with everyone else. Even if the pressure was more subtle, such as imported vehicles costing more as it's a different model to the entire rest of the world...
The number 1 feature I want in current filesystems is block-level checksums. I've had to perform data recovery for a number of people recently (yes, backups help, but sometimes having them just 24 hours out of date means there are advantages to attempting to recover the data off the failed or failing drive or array)
Now, using a combination of tools I've been able to get the faulty drive to give me back data, but I've got no way whatsoever of knowing if the data it's given back to me is actually the data that was stored on it in the first place.
Having end-to-end checksums would easily allow me to assign a confidence level to data recovery procedures, letting me know that the data I have retrieved is what was stored - it would also allow better control over operations like fsck or chkdsk if the blocks that hold metadata are also checksummed, that way it would be possible to tell if a block has been randomly corrupted somehow, or if it's stored as intended.
adobe cs6 is $2600 usd + 1400 markup = 4000.. or 54% more - 10% GST = 44%
Coincidentally, that nearly matches the change in the exchange rates (according to you).
If I buy a microwave for $100 USD that was made in Mexico.. and the USD becomes worth more... They don't adjust their US price.. the manufacturer pockets the difference.
If Adobe software was priced at $4000 AUD, and the exchange rate changes, and they still priced it at 4000 AUD.. how is that any different. It's just keeping the local prices intact.
No, you're wrong. Adobe deals with the distributors here in Australia with a price list that is based on US dollars and fluctuates almost daily. If the AUD is suddenly worth less against the USD, the price goes up. Most resellers will, to a point, absorb some of this cost to keep a nice round figure for the price on their website, but even some resellers will quote against the current price and that quote will only be valid for a week as the price does move frequently.
Why should anyone have to pay more tax than they're required to by law?
Corporations have more loopholes than natural people to reduce the amount of tax that they pay, but even normal people have a number of ways that they can minimise the amount of tax that they're required to pay. If these methods are perfectly legal, then why would you not avail yourself of them?
Would you voluntarily pay more tax than you are legally obliged to?
Furthermore, I can absolutely guarantee you that Apple are not the only company doing this, they're just the flavour of the month and they generate page views around here. s/Apple/Microsoft/g, s/Apple/IBM/g or s/Apple/Google/g or pretty well any other large company at all and the story will read the same.
As you observe, SMART is only partially useful. If SMART says that a disk is going to fail soon, it's generally pretty reliable - that disk is pretty well guaranteed to fail soon. However the reverse is not true - if SMART says that the disk passes, that's not a reliable indicator that the drive is operating 100% perfectly and will continue to do so.
It's been a loooong time since hard drives used oil in their bearings. They've commonly used quieter and cheaper Fluid Bearings for something like the past 10 years. No, in this case the fluid isn't oil, but air.
Not trapping CTL-ALT-DEL has nothing to do with the users not accepting the system and everything to do with the underlying technical platform that OS/2 was based on.
That Windows could even trap that sequence was because of it's use of the virtual 8086 mode of the 386 processor, doing low-level stuff with dedicated hardware, rather than the approach that OS/2 took of doing it in software.
This is exactly what the SKA are going to do. Look up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Long_Baseline_Interferometry It does mean though that there has to be a an incredibly fast, low-latency and reliable data connection between all the elements in the array for it to be of any use though.
And now with the march of technology, you can 1/3 this number of pixels in a handheld tablet costing under a grand. Look to Apple for the next wave of high-res desktop displays (although don't expect them to be $200 for a 27" display)
Don't have slides that say word-for-word what you're saying. They are not your notes to read from, they need to be bullet points that back up and emphasise what you're saying.
Minimal amount of slides otherwise people will turn off.
Minimum 30 point font on the slides, this will force you to keep them succinct.
For a good guide to the art of presentation, look at any recent Apple keynote presentation.
Digital is digital. It's ones and zeroes. Files stored digitally don't degrade, unless you're talking about media degradation (ex., CDs and DVDs can possibly suffer from loss of data over time).
Yes, they do. You can easily get unrecoverable single-bit errors in RAM and on hard drives. This is why higher end computers use ECC or EDC RAM, so they can detect and/or correct single bit errors in RAM. Bits randomly flip due to quantum effects, cosmic rays and background radiation (among other things)
This also happens on hard drives where, at the lowest layer, the signal is analogue. Bits flip, or don't get recorded correctly. Next generation filesystems use checksums on all data to detect and/or correct these errors too. There are multiple levels of ECC on data stored on a hard drive, but most consumer level hard drives are only specified to have on the order of 1 undetected and unrecoverable error per TB of capacity.
The given range for human hearing is 20Hz to 20KHz - as an analogue waveform.
To convert this to the digital realm, it must be sampled into discrete numbers.
In order to *perfectly* recover the waveform, it *must* be sampled at twice the frequency of the highest frequency you want to capture. There's no "some theoretical benefit" to sampling at 40+kHz, it is absolutely necessary in order to represent a 20kHz waveform. Going higher has a measurable benefit as there is no perfect filter that will let 20kHz pass and yet stop 20.001KHz from getting through - this is a low-pass filter (or a high-cut filter) and they work by gradually (over a range of frequencies) cutting it back from full pass at, say, 20kHz to full cut at, say, 22kHz. That's why the 44.1kHz sample rate gives us some headroom for the filters to work their magic. Why 44.1 exactly? It's all got to do with old U-Matic video tapes and PAL/NTSC frame rates.
The argument for going above 44.1kHz is that the low pass filter can be more easily engineered and have less audible artefacts if it's got a wider range of frequencies to work with, that and there is a school of thought that says even though you can't really hear much over 20kHz, you get harmonics of these sounds at lower frequencies that subtly changes the sound.
Yep, I see this too. Or they dump it on their desktop and run it from there or... well, just about anything except actually putting it where it belongs and launching it from there.
No it still works, and I see this all the time with Skype. You drag the icon to the Dock from a dog (that lives, say, in your Downloads folder). After you reboot, when you launch the app, OS X will find the dog, mount it and launch the app as if nothing unusual is happening.
It drives me crazy to see all these people running Skype directly off the disk image. I don't know why it's most commonly Skype, especially considering the pretty picture Skype has inside it's disk image showing you to drag the icon to the (alias to the) Applications folder right next to the Skype icon.
The real question is not why TRSF is the same price for the print version as for the electronic version (and what to do if you, as I do, want both - a book to put on the shelf and a kindle version to read) but why is Arc $7 for the electronic version and $30 for the print-on-demand hardcopy version. Does it really cost $23 to print something on paper?
I backup hourly, not because I'm scared my SSD will fail, but because it's trivial to do and it's protected me on more than one occasion.
I agree about splash screens though - if the app is taking so long to launch that I need to see something, let me access part of the app so I can begin to load files or work one something, don't show me a colourful box.
Slashdot Mirror
(Original submitter here)
When I'm talking about "business" or "consumer" grade, I'm talking about the difference between, say, a Lenovo ThinkPad T Series (I consider this a business laptop) as it's got a metal chassis, no flashy chrome and it's not loaded from the factory with buckets of crapware, versus say a cheap Dell that's got shiny plastic all over it, the entire thing creaks and flexes as you pick it up or open the lid and it's loaded up to the hilt with more crap software than anyone really needs...
In this case, raw specs play a second place to ergonomics and build quality. This is for my accountant to use Excel and QuickBooks on. She needs a keypad, it's as simple as that. I want to get her a laptop that's not going to fall apart in a couple of weeks. She doesn't need a quad-core i7, 8GB RAM and a 2GB graphics card. She does need a decent sized screen (in particular vertical resolution is very important for Excel) and she does use the laptop on the move all the time, so not having a plug-in USB keypad (which I'll admit was my first response to her requirements) is important as there will often be nowhere for her to place it.
She's currently got a 17" Dell, is not too worried about the size or the weight, however after 2-3 years of daily use on the move, this laptop is ready to fall apart.
Cost is largely irrelevant, within reason of course, and a laptop that's going to last the distance and not break is more important than getting the fastest CPU available.
(I'm the submitter of this Ask)
That looks awesome - the best of both worlds is to have a compact laptop with a keypad, and if the keypad can pop out the side, then that'd be great.
It's a damn shame that they don't make them any more...
CGI has a LONG way to go before it can replace a good photograph. A well-composed, well-lit photograph can say more than most 3D animations ever could. And a photo is a lot easier and cheaper to produce. Who is going to pay a team of digital artists $100 an hour to create a 3D model of something when you can just tell Jimmy Olsen to go take a picture of it for a pittance?
The software to do 3D may be getting easier and cheaper. But good 3D artists aren't. And a single picture of a wounded, crying girl in Syria will always have a helluva lot more power than any 3D rendering of the deployment of Syrian forces. Photography isn't going all-CGI any more than movies are.
Good photographers charge similar rates, if not more than CGI artists.
Sure, pressing the button on a camera may only take a fraction of a second, but there's the setting up of the shot, selecting the equipment, getting the lighting right, taking a number of shots, selecting the shots for retouching, processing the RAW images, retouching the images etc...
The real telling fact that photography is (in some situations) getting replaced with CGI is that it's already being done and you and I can't tell when it's done properly.
You can only tell if it's CGI when it's not done well.
I know a company that does photography for the auto industry. They mix their real photos with CGI. They receive CAD models from the automakers that are modelled down to the detail of the threads on a screw that holds an assembly in place. They render and/or raytrace imagery, using advanced shaders for things like the metallic paint on a car and caustics to project realistic lighting patterns from headlights and then these rendered images are blended with actual photography. You simply can not tell that the image isn't 100% real.
Why go to all this trouble? In this case a vehicle produced for a domestic market may have, say, different tail lights. They'll shoot the foreign import model, render the domestic tail lights and stitch it together.
If there were only two countries that drove on the left-hand side of the road, or only two countries that didn't speak English, then I'd imagine that there'd be some pretty heavy international pressure for them to get in line with everyone else. Even if the pressure was more subtle, such as imported vehicles costing more as it's a different model to the entire rest of the world...
No, they say change the channel
The number 1 feature I want in current filesystems is block-level checksums.
I've had to perform data recovery for a number of people recently (yes, backups help, but sometimes having them just 24 hours out of date means there are advantages to attempting to recover the data off the failed or failing drive or array)
Now, using a combination of tools I've been able to get the faulty drive to give me back data, but I've got no way whatsoever of knowing if the data it's given back to me is actually the data that was stored on it in the first place.
Having end-to-end checksums would easily allow me to assign a confidence level to data recovery procedures, letting me know that the data I have retrieved is what was stored - it would also allow better control over operations like fsck or chkdsk if the blocks that hold metadata are also checksummed, that way it would be possible to tell if a block has been randomly corrupted somehow, or if it's stored as intended.
Didn't you just explain the entire markup?
adobe cs6 is $2600 usd + 1400 markup = 4000.. or 54% more - 10% GST = 44%
Coincidentally, that nearly matches the change in the exchange rates (according to you).
If I buy a microwave for $100 USD that was made in Mexico.. and the USD becomes worth more... They don't adjust their US price.. the manufacturer pockets the difference.
If Adobe software was priced at $4000 AUD, and the exchange rate changes, and they still priced it at 4000 AUD.. how is that any different. It's just keeping the local prices intact.
No, you're wrong. Adobe deals with the distributors here in Australia with a price list that is based on US dollars and fluctuates almost daily. If the AUD is suddenly worth less against the USD, the price goes up. Most resellers will, to a point, absorb some of this cost to keep a nice round figure for the price on their website, but even some resellers will quote against the current price and that quote will only be valid for a week as the price does move frequently.
The question, if you insist on looking at it that way, is why does every large company hate America (or wherever they are incorporated)?
The question I'm putting to you is why would you voluntarily pay more tax than you are legally obliged to?
Why should anyone have to pay more tax than they're required to by law?
Corporations have more loopholes than natural people to reduce the amount of tax that they pay, but even normal people have a number of ways that they can minimise the amount of tax that they're required to pay. If these methods are perfectly legal, then why would you not avail yourself of them?
Would you voluntarily pay more tax than you are legally obliged to?
Furthermore, I can absolutely guarantee you that Apple are not the only company doing this, they're just the flavour of the month and they generate page views around here. s/Apple/Microsoft/g, s/Apple/IBM/g or s/Apple/Google/g or pretty well any other large company at all and the story will read the same.
As you observe, SMART is only partially useful.
If SMART says that a disk is going to fail soon, it's generally pretty reliable - that disk is pretty well guaranteed to fail soon.
However the reverse is not true - if SMART says that the disk passes, that's not a reliable indicator that the drive is operating 100% perfectly and will continue to do so.
Thanks slashdot for mangling the link - I meant to link the words Fluid Bearings to the wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_bearing
It's been a loooong time since hard drives used oil in their bearings. They've commonly used quieter and cheaper Fluid Bearings for something like the past 10 years. No, in this case the fluid isn't oil, but air.
Not trapping CTL-ALT-DEL has nothing to do with the users not accepting the system and everything to do with the underlying technical platform that OS/2 was based on.
That Windows could even trap that sequence was because of it's use of the virtual 8086 mode of the 386 processor, doing low-level stuff with dedicated hardware, rather than the approach that OS/2 took of doing it in software.
This is exactly what the SKA are going to do.
Look up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Long_Baseline_Interferometry
It does mean though that there has to be a an incredibly fast, low-latency and reliable data connection between all the elements in the array for it to be of any use though.
And now with the march of technology, you can 1/3 this number of pixels in a handheld tablet costing under a grand. Look to Apple for the next wave of high-res desktop displays (although don't expect them to be $200 for a 27" display)
+1 for 10/20/30 rule.
Don't have slides that say word-for-word what you're saying. They are not your notes to read from, they need to be bullet points that back up and emphasise what you're saying.
Minimal amount of slides otherwise people will turn off.
Minimum 30 point font on the slides, this will force you to keep them succinct.
For a good guide to the art of presentation, look at any recent Apple keynote presentation.
This threat is easy to fix. Have the person in the scanner rotate 180 instead of simply standing still.
Digital is digital. It's ones and zeroes. Files stored digitally don't degrade, unless you're talking about media degradation (ex., CDs and DVDs can possibly suffer from loss of data over time).
Yes, they do. You can easily get unrecoverable single-bit errors in RAM and on hard drives. This is why higher end computers use ECC or EDC RAM, so they can detect and/or correct single bit errors in RAM. Bits randomly flip due to quantum effects, cosmic rays and background radiation (among other things)
This also happens on hard drives where, at the lowest layer, the signal is analogue. Bits flip, or don't get recorded correctly. Next generation filesystems use checksums on all data to detect and/or correct these errors too. There are multiple levels of ECC on data stored on a hard drive, but most consumer level hard drives are only specified to have on the order of 1 undetected and unrecoverable error per TB of capacity.
Your ear is 100% analogue. It does not sample.
The given range for human hearing is 20Hz to 20KHz - as an analogue waveform.
To convert this to the digital realm, it must be sampled into discrete numbers.
In order to *perfectly* recover the waveform, it *must* be sampled at twice the frequency of the highest frequency you want to capture. There's no "some theoretical benefit" to sampling at 40+kHz, it is absolutely necessary in order to represent a 20kHz waveform. Going higher has a measurable benefit as there is no perfect filter that will let 20kHz pass and yet stop 20.001KHz from getting through - this is a low-pass filter (or a high-cut filter) and they work by gradually (over a range of frequencies) cutting it back from full pass at, say, 20kHz to full cut at, say, 22kHz. That's why the 44.1kHz sample rate gives us some headroom for the filters to work their magic. Why 44.1 exactly? It's all got to do with old U-Matic video tapes and PAL/NTSC frame rates.
The argument for going above 44.1kHz is that the low pass filter can be more easily engineered and have less audible artefacts if it's got a wider range of frequencies to work with, that and there is a school of thought that says even though you can't really hear much over 20kHz, you get harmonics of these sounds at lower frequencies that subtly changes the sound.
Yep, I see this too. Or they dump it on their desktop and run it from there or... well, just about anything except actually putting it where it belongs and launching it from there.
I see people do this all the time, especially with Skype.
See my post above...
No it still works, and I see this all the time with Skype. You drag the icon to the Dock from a dog (that lives, say, in your Downloads folder).
After you reboot, when you launch the app, OS X will find the dog, mount it and launch the app as if nothing unusual is happening.
It drives me crazy to see all these people running Skype directly off the disk image. I don't know why it's most commonly Skype, especially considering the pretty picture Skype has inside it's disk image showing you to drag the icon to the (alias to the) Applications folder right next to the Skype icon.
I think you're confusing copyright with patents. There's no prior art on copyright.
The real question is not why TRSF is the same price for the print version as for the electronic version (and what to do if you, as I do, want both - a book to put on the shelf and a kindle version to read) but why is Arc $7 for the electronic version and $30 for the print-on-demand hardcopy version. Does it really cost $23 to print something on paper?
I backup hourly, not because I'm scared my SSD will fail, but because it's trivial to do and it's protected me on more than one occasion.
I agree about splash screens though - if the app is taking so long to launch that I need to see something, let me access part of the app so I can begin to load files or work one something, don't show me a colourful box.